Dr. Metablog

Lyin' Ryan? We Report, You Decide

There's been so much noise about Governor Romney stonewalling calls to release his tax returns and so much commentary about the one he did release, that the anomalies in running-mate Paul Ryan's tax returns have been overlooked. 

When Ryan made his 2011 taxes public, he had to "amend" what he and his lobbyist wife had initially reported. It seems that he had "inadvertently" failed to report $61,122 in income. Now sixty grand might be chicken feed for the Governor, but it's a big hunk for the Representative. It raises his total income to $323,416 and bumps up his taxes by $19,917. The sixty-thousand bucks comes from an income-producing trust that he inherited from his wife's mother, a successful Oklahoma attorney. Moreover, on June 6 of this year, Ryan amended two years of financial disclosure reports that he filed with the clerk of the House of Representatives which show that the trust produced income of between $100,001 and $1 million.

So Ryan "forgot" that he had inherited a small fortune from his mother-in-law, and he "forgot" to report to the IRS just about 20% of his income.  Fortunately, he remembered both of these facts when he began to come under consideration for national office and knew that his finances would be closely scrutinized.  

Ryan is a supposedly a policy wonk, touted for his attention to detail. He's an expert in taxation and expenditure -- or so we're told.  But he's not, apparently, attentive to his own affairs.

He's also the person who claimed to have run a sub-five minute marathon and to have climbed o-so-many of Colorado's mountains.

So, constant reader, here are your choices. Either Paul Ryan (a) "inadvertently forgot" to include $60,000 worth of income on his 2011 taxes, or (b) he's a untrustworthy, lying scumbag who suits the facts to the situation, and who was hoping to get away without paying his fair share and only came clean when it looked as though someone would notice. 

We report;  you decide.

(I'm trying to think, if I were the recipient of a $60,000 a year inheritance, which I'm not, whether I could possibly "forget" to report it as income. Nope, can't imagine such a circumstance.)

Tweeblaarkanniedood, or Khurob, or Nyanka, or Anyango, or Whatever You Want to Call It.

I read with enthusiasm Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (New York, 2012), a pop biology book which describes various plants and animals that originated millenia ago and that survive outwardly unchanged to the present day. It's a great subject and might have been a great book if Fortey had been less anecdotal and more informative, and if he not just blathered into the tape recorder but had paid attention to organization and prose style.

Ever since my summers at Makamah in the 1940s, I've had an affection for horseshoe crabs. They were abundant then, although scary and definitely not-to-be-stepped-on, and although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are very rare now, especially in populated areas like the Sound. I would not have known that horseshoe crabs date from the pre-hemoglobin era and that their blood (or blood-equivalent) is based not on iron but on copper. I did not know anything about velvet worms or the various ancient slimes with which Fortey is so taken, but I am well-acquainted with horsetails, which, however primitive they may be, continue to thrive rather wonderfully around our West Bradford pond. 

Of all Fortey's species, my favorite is unquestionably the welwitschia, or, as it is sometimes called, the tweeblaarkanniedood, or khurob, or nyanka, or onyango -- a plant which is no less exotic than its various names. 

It's the only plant in its order (although it can claim fossil relatives) and it hangs on in Namibia and Angola. It's a very distant relative of pines and spruces, having diverged in the late Permian. Welwitschia has an extremely odd growth habit. It makes only two true leaves in its lifetime, but the leaves, which might be imagined as very wide ribbons, grow constantly throughout the long life of the plant. The leaves can be fifteen feet long;  the plant can live for a thousand and some think even two thousand years.  Here's a welwitschia: it's not a classically handsome plant, not a garden beauty.   

Goddesses Excellently Bright

At the Perfect Pear, our local eatery, dinner was less than ambrosial, but halfway through the mashed potatoes, the room was suddenly illuminated by an astonishingly beautiful young woman who arrived (drums, and trumpets, and more trumpets) with bland boyfriend in tow. She was lambent and glowing -- so lovely that I felt the urge to get up and whisper in her ear that her brilliance had refreshed and cheered my entire day.

Of course I did no such thing.  I'm not that kind of guy.  

Later, I fell into a reverie and brought to mind the very few magnificently beautiful women whom I had encountered in my life. Now I don't mean women who are merely or very attractive, of whom there are, thankfully, many; nor women upon whom one's youthful self has lavished an intense passing crush. I mean women who are goddess-beautiful. Women around whose brows flames flicker, and who, when they walk, do not touch their feet to the ground. Here they are:

In Ithaca, Margaret C., a sylph or naiad. In Cambridge, the young Aphrodite who sprawled so fetchingly in Widener's periodical room, unconscious of the attention she garnered. At the pottery, Mariel ----- ("Ariel with an M,"she said), a psychologist, who, though already greying, was a perfect Juno. Students: in New York, Ms. ----- Pavony, who glowed for almost an entire silent semester, right up to the precise moment that she contributed to the discussion in the squeaky voice and accent of a 1930s M-G-M telephone operator. In Denver, Ms. {exotic first name] Samuels, who, I'm happy to say, remained silent on the rare days she deigned to come to class. A Hindu fertility goddess, yes -- but perhaps also a daughter of Zion. On the airplane: the radiant Denver actress, who confided to me that her best part "so far" was a Midol commercial. On the bus: the young lady with the electric green eyes. At the Folger: the luscious student from France, as lovely as a young woman can possibly be, who said to me, "Can I ask you a question about Shakespeare? Why do some of the lines stop in the middle of the page and some go right to the margin?" Oh, would that she had not asked!

And while I mused over my small handful of goddesses excellently bright, I remembered that on two separate occasions, forty or fifty years ago, an older gentleman had approached Mrs. Dr. Metablog to say, in these or equivalent words, "thank you for being so beautiful."

At the time, I was taken aback, but now, in my pre-dotage, I fully comprehend.

(It stands to reason that I must also have encountered young men of great beauty, but, try as I will, I can't bring any to mind.)

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Here's a case of double amnesia, in which a second case of the disease is overlain over the first (as usual, once the amnesia genie is activated, screenwriters cry havoc and let slip the dogs of anything goes).

Our hero, played by a tired Liam Neeson, awakes from a coma not remembering much but thinking he's Dr. Martin Harris, a geneticist. He has no identification, and no one knows him, even his young wife. Turns out, he's not Dr. Harris at all, but a professional assassin who has somehow forgotten that his alias is an alias. It takes an innocent new girlfriend and several car chases and some highly-choreographed fist fights before he comes to his senses. Once he realizes that he's a professional killer, however, he turns over a new leaf and becomes a Good Guy. He thwarts the intended assassination and with solemn steps and slow, begins a new moral life.

Here's the question that occurred to me:  a guy is a long-time, career assassin. He has an accident and forgets that he was a murderer. Then little by little he remembers. Is it probable that his personality would change and he would be reborn to innocence and good citizenship, I only ask because that's the red herring that Unknown's audience is asked to masticate? I myself don't buy it.

Neeson asks, over and over, "Who am I?"  In serious works of literature (cf. Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am'), such a question is tragic.  In amnesia movies, "Who am I" is not tragic but merely mcguffinic.

Does Religion Rot the Brain?

Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read.

Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement -- a sect that, at least as she describes it, is unhappy, puritanical, finicky, repressive, ferociously anti-rational, patriarchal, and bossy. Boys study Talmud but girls are not educated past a high school -- what would be the point, when, as Deborah's grandfather once told her, "girls belong in the kitchen?" Feldman's memoir is not just dreary, it's ostentatiously lurid. Its subtitle is "the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots" -- and the attention-mongering scandals that she recounts are mostly sexual in nature. 

There is a old story that John Ruskin collapsed in a heap when he discovered, on his wedding night, that his bride had pubic hair. Feldman out-Victorians the great Victorian, claiming that she did not know that she had a vagina, an entrance, an opening, "down there." Is such ignorance possible in this age?  And then she explores her sexual failings, mostly her vaginismus-induced post-honeymoon extended virginity -- which she blames on her Satmar upbringing (although want of curiosity might also be a factor).

Feldman's memoir has upset the Hasidic community and there is at least one website devoted entirely to attacking its veracity. And in fact the memoir does contain the commonplace omissions and elisions of autobiography --  none of which seem to invalidate the whole. However, the defenders of the sect miss the point (as does Ms. Feldman).

The Satmar movement isn't reprehensible because it dishonors brains and women and especially women's brains. It's reprehensible because it is erected on a lie. "We learn in school that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for enlightening themselves. He came to clean us up, eliminate all the assimilated Jews...."  What an absurd and odious doctrine! Are we expected to entertain the hypothesis that six million Jews died for eating lobster?  "The first and greatest Satmar rebbe said that if we became model Jews, just like in the olden days, then something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again, because God would be pleased with us." So Hitler and the Nazis and the SS and the camps are a) the fault of the Jews themselves, and b) God can be placated if all Jewish women wear thick stockings and wigs and cover themselves from collarbone to wrist and knee.  It's a brainless argument, and one that, if you think about it for a few seconds, gives the victory to Hitler. Plus, it's an argument that creates a god who is even crueler and more idiotic than usual.  

Indoctrinated with this criminal bullshit, the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants voluntarily re-ghettoize themselves and, of their own foolish accord, imprison themselves into a new dark age of their own invention.

Here's what I learned from this book. Satmar is a check-your-brains-at-the-door cult that controls 130,000 adherents who manifest all the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's "bad things will happen to me if I step on a crack on the sidewalk" raised several painful orders of magnitude.  

Ms. Feldman may have escaped the cult but she's still in the dark. She's left Satmar behind because she couldn't read the books she wanted to read or wear the clothes she wanted to wear and she couldn't locate her own vagina. But it's not her vagina that readers should worry about;  it's her brain.  

Precision in Language

Grandma (affectionately):  "You're a silly duckling."

Lola (age 2+):  "I'm not a duckling.  I'm a people."